Clarion India
NEW DELHI – Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party (SBSP) chief Om Prakash Rajbhar on Saturday questioned the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) for denying a party ticket to jailed gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari and calling him a criminal and said everybody had been targeting the Mau MLA because of his Muslim identity.
“More than half of the people sitting in Parliament are criminals. In UP Vidhan Sabha, more than half are criminals. Because he (Mukhtar) is Muslim, everybody is pointing fingers at him…Be it BJP, SP, BSP, or Congress, whenever they want to win an election in Purvanchal, they go and bow down to Mukhtar Ansari. The poor and weak there consider him a messiah,” Rajbhar told reporters in Etawah.
The SBSP leader said there was a time when BSP president Mayawati called him a “messiah of poor”, but now she had changed her stand.
Mayawati had on Friday announced that she would not field “bahubalis” (strongmen) or mafia members in the 2022 Assembly polls and dumped Ansari as a poll candidate. Within hours of the announcement, the AIMIM, which is an ally of the SBSP, offered to field Ansari.
Later in the day, Rajbhar addressed the ‘Vanchit Shoshit Ati-Pichhda Ati-Dalit Varg Adhikar Sammelan’ and claimed that at a time when all parties were involved in organising ‘Prabuddha Varg Sammelan’, he was working to awaken the most backward class. The BJP and BSP has separately organised a series of symposiums under the banner of ‘Prabuddha Varg Sammelan’.
“The Supreme Court gave the order to build a Ram temple. When the Trust was formed, no Ahir, Kurmi, Bind, Nishad, Kashyap, Rajbhar, Banjara, Bahelia, Karkvanshi was given a place…when slogans are to be raised, we are needed,” he said.